Steven Bochco (14 page)

CHAPTER 27

Have you ever bought a lottery ticket? I mean, even if you're not a regular player, every once in a while, when the payout gets up in the mega-millions—you know, like 75, 85 million dollars—you say to yourself, What the hell, and when you're paying for breakfast up at Mort's Deli in the Palisades, you take back your change in lottery tickets.

They say your odds of winning the lottery are something on the order of 40 million to one. You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning or waking up one morning to discover that you've morphed into a fucking cockroach overnight. But you buy the tickets anyway, right? And in spite of yourself, you entertain the fantasy of what you'll do with the money when you win it.

Let's see . . . 85 million, you're going to want to take the lump-sum payout, which turns out to be 54 million or so at present-day value, then divide by two for taxes, and you're looking at 27 million bucks—net, net.

Now you start spending it. This is L.A., so you figure you could easily go 6 or 7 million for a proper home befitting your new status as a multimillionaire, plus you've got to go another million for furnishings. Then let's say you just flat-out blow a couple of million on toys, like a Ferrari Pininfarina coupe, a world-class wine cellar, and a state-of-the-art media room. Next, subtract 10 from the 27 you started with, and you've got 17 million left. You figure, I'm not going to be an asshole. I've won the lottery. I'm set for life if I don't fuck it up. So you take the remaining 17 million and invest it in tax-frees, figuring you can live off the income for the rest of your life, except it turns out that tax-frees are as lousy an investment as everything else out there. You know what your annual yield off 17 million in tax-frees is, these days? About
175,000,
give or take.

Okay—rewind the tape. You bought a couple of lottery tickets. Inconceivably, beyond all odds, your ship came in, you won
85 million bucks,
and for all your trouble, not even counting the friends and relatives lining up with their hands out, calling you a cheap fuck for not giving them a taste, what did you wind up with? A nice house and $175,000 a year, which barely covers your property tax and maintenance. Christ, you thought you'd struck it rich, and you find out you still have to work for a living.

I guess 85 million just doesn't go as far as it used to. But you buy the tickets anyway, because you're not thinking about the practical realities of a windfall—you're just caught up in the fantasy of it. And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, notwithstanding the billion-to-one long shot, people get caught up in the dream of hitting it big in Hollywood. Fame, money, freedom, sex, power, you name it—in short, escape from the ordinary restraints of normal life—and all it takes is unusual luck, unusual beauty (big tits wouldn't hurt, either), and a willingness (eagerness, even) to fuck your buddy before he fucks you. You know the old saying—success is never so sweet as when accompanied by the failure of a friend.

So if you think of Hollywood as a never-ending lottery, in which your odds of getting hit by lightning are better than your chances of catching it in a bottle, you begin to get some sense of the jealousy, the desperation, the naked aggression you can encounter as you crawl on your belly through the vast minefield that separates you from the success you spend every waking moment of your life lusting after.

In that scenario, talent is usually secondary to ambition, and morality, to say the least, is MIA. And yet they keep on coming. I guess it's a testament to the human spirit, or maybe just the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest. Or maybe they're both the same: excuse me, coming through, get the fuck out of my way, give me what I want or I'll take it from you.

The vast majority of people who flock to Hollywood looking to win the lottery never even get into the game. But anybody who's ever plugged away on the periphery of fame and fortune knows that if you do get a shot at it—a real, honest to God, once-in-a-lifetime shot at the brass ring—and you don't grab for it no matter what—or who—is in your way, you're a genuine, twenty-four-carat
schmuck.

Then there's the fact that as hard as it may be to achieve success, it's even harder to maintain it. And by the same reasoning,
having
a moral compass isn't nearly as hard as holding on to it against the riptide of avarice, corruption, jealousy, envy, and general moral bankruptcy that are the hallmarks of the Hollywood entertainment industry.

Dennis will be the first one to tell you he's not exactly a choirboy. He's done things he's not proud of, personally and professionally. He's cut corners, he's violated people's rights, but he's always had a conscience, he's always known right from wrong, and when he's done wrong things, he always felt he was doing them for right reasons. Of course, rationalizing the things you do to people on the grounds that the ends justify the means is a slippery slope, and Dennis knows it.

That said, Dennis is reminded of the time he went to New York City to pick up six hundred thousand dollars
cash
for an actor friend of his, who'd won it off the bookies during an out-of-his-mind lucky weekend betting college and pro football games. The friend was scared to go himself, partly because he was a fairly well known celebrity and mostly because he was afraid someone would kill him for the money. Six hundred thousand bucks cash, in a duffel bag, is a lot of incentive. People get killed for a lot fewer zeroes than that.

So, as a favor, and against his better judgment, Dennis goes to New York, meets some wiseguy named Bogo in the hallway of an Upper West Side tenement, and takes delivery of the bag of cash, letting Bogo see the nine-millimeter Glock clipped to his belt during the exchange. Dennis checks to make sure the whole six hundred thou is in the bag, and then, as he's leaving to go back to the airport, Bogo gives him a big grin and says, “America, huh? What a country.”

Indeed. And on the plane ride back to L.A., Dennis can't help contemplating all the ways he could steal the money and get away with it. It's gambling money, in cash, in a duffel bag, sitting between his feet. All he has to do is tell his friend that the bookie stiffed him. Or that three guys took him off in the hallway. Or that the money was stolen out of his hotel room. Or maybe all he has to do is look his friend in the eye and say, “What money?” What's the friend going to do about it? Not a fucking thing. Gambling is illegal, and Dennis is a cop.

Of course at the end of the day, Dennis gave his grateful friend the bag full of money, and the guy lost it all and then some the next weekend in Las Vegas, betting craps and playing blackjack.

Dennis swore to himself that if he ever got another chance at the brass ring, he wouldn't fuck it up again.

These reflections on the moral implications of success and failure are brought to you by Dennis Farentino, ladies and gentlemen, as he winds his way up the Hollywood Hills toward Bobby's house, speed-dialing A.D.A. Lynette Alvarez as he drives.

When she comes on the line, Dennis says, “Lynnie, this is Dennis . . . I'm good. You? . . . I know, I've been jammed with this Ramon Montevideo deal . . . I know, I will, I promise. Soon. But lookit, I need you to do something for me.”

And he tells her about Vee's arrest last night, how he pulled rank on the sheriff's deputies who made the bust because he needed to question her about the evidence they found in her car, separate from the drugs, which pertains to his murder investigation. “Turns out the blow was planted,” Dennis says, “which I'm on my way to confirm, but in the meantime, this poor girl's still being held down at Hollywood Division, scared to death, and I'd like to get her kicked. Could you take care of that for me?”

Dennis grins. “No, I'm not banging her. I'd tell you if I was, I swear to God. Will you do this for me? Just take care of the paperwork and tell Lonnie to give her a ride home, okay? You're the best.”

By now he's pulled to the curb across the street from Bobby's house.

When Bobby answers the door, Dennis looks at his day-old beard and his red, puffy eyes. “You look like shit,” he says. “You also smell like shit.”

“I love you too,” Bobby says, and walks back into the house. Dennis follows him into the kitchen and pours himself a cup of coffee.

“Help yourself,” Bobby says.

“We're in a good mood this morning.”

“Fuck you very much. What do you want?”

Because he's been up all night, and because Vee's tits are still in a wringer, Dennis doesn't come sidearm.

“Where were you last night?” he asks, cutting to the chase.

“I was home, writing and drinking, then just drinking, and I passed out and here I am. Where were
you
?” Bobby asks pointedly.

Dennis can see that Bobby's going to be an asshole, and he's not in the mood for it.

“I got a theory. You want to hear it?”

“I love a good theory,” Bobby says.

“My theory is, the night Vee left you, you were out on your deck, half shit-faced, spying on your neighbors through your telescope, and as luck would have it, you saw Ramon Montevideo get murdered, which by the way is how you knew the murder weapon was his own Alma, which was not public knowledge. And instead of reporting it, you decided to write it. But a good writer's gotta know his characters, what motivates them and so forth. So you went down to Ramon's house, you let yourself in through the bedroom door off the pool, and you found Ramon's secret video stash, plus the tape in the VCR of Ramon banging whoever it was who also killed him, which I'm guessing was your current squeeze, Linda Paulson.”

Now that he's got Bobby's attention big-time, Dennis warms to his narrative. “So then you sniff around the room, find Ramon's little fuck book with your wife's name in it, rummage around till you find
her
tape, the one where she's blowing Ramon, and you split—with the little black book, the tape of your wife, and, most important of all, the tape of Linda Paulson killing Ramon. You knew you should've called the cops, but it's more fun to write it than report it. So you started a relationship with Linda. You already knew she liked to fuck around on Marv—hell, everyone in town knew that—you started a relationship with me to get the cop's point of view, and then, just when it seems like you've won the lottery, you and your wife get into a big fucking beef in her lawyer's office because you want her to come back and she doesn't want to, and because you're a sick, jealous fuck, you decide to teach her a little lesson by framing her for Ramon's murder. So you put cocaine in her car, set it on fire, and when the firemen find the coke in her car, they call the cops, and the cops find the tape and the little black book, and bingo, the cocaine's just the come-on. The jackpot is, she's arrested for murder . . . Pretty good, huh?”

Bobby shakes his head. “Amazing,” he says. “You are fucking amazing.” And then, “You want to hear
my
theory?”

Dennis shrugs. “Sure.”

“Okay. Here's
my
theory. You interview my wife during the course of your investigation. She bats her baby blues at you like she does to every guy she ever meets and, what the hell, you're a stick man, you figure you'll take a shot. Take her out to dinner, do your bullshit Columbo thing for her, tell her about all your cases, get her home, and throw a hump into her. 'Course, when you get there, the cops and the fire trucks are all over the place, they want to arrest her 'cause of the coke they find on the seat of her car, and in the process, they also find Ramon's little book, plus the tape of Vee fucking his brains out. Ramon gave her a B-plus in oral, and you're pissed off you couldn't get a little of that yourself, maybe compare your test score against his. So you take her in, she denies everything, tells you it had to be her husband who planted the blow in her car, plus she's banging this Jared Axelrod prick, check it out, I was with him the night of the murder, she says, I swear, oh please, oh please, boo hoo, boo hoo . . . How'm I doing so far?”

“So far, you're talking yourself into getting arrested.”

“For what?”

“How about for accessory to murder. Obstruction of justice. Interfering with a police investigation. Conspiracy.”

“This isn't
Columbo,
Dennis. You gotta prove it, and I don't think you can.”

“How about I get a warrant to seize your computer? Are you telling me that screenplay you're writing isn't going to give me the proof I'm looking for?”

Shit. The screenplay.

“So here's the deal,” Dennis says. “First of all, I want twenty-five percent of whatever you sell your screenplay for, plus I want shared story credit. Second of all, you tell me everything, right this fucking minute—who you saw, what you took, everything. And if you don't, I'm gonna see to it you go to jail for twenty years, and then you'll
really
have something to write about, at least when your ass isn't too sore to sit down from getting hit in the seat every day of your miserable fucking life.”

“All right,” Bobby says after a couple of seconds. “In exchange for immunity
and
anonymity, I'll give you the twenty-five percent. But if you want screen credit, you've gotta show me you can actually write—that you're more than just a cop with a bunch of bullshit stories you like to trot out for the tourists over a couple of beers. And till you prove different, all you are is the dummy and I'm the guy with my hand up your ass making your lips move.”

Dennis is suddenly very tired, so he just says okay.

Bobby fetches him the tape of Linda screwing Ramon then clobbering him over the head with the four-pound Alma, plus he admits having the affair with Linda so he could, as Dennis put it, get inside her head a little. He even tells Dennis about the meeting in Vee's lawyer's office and how it wasn't until after she told him to go fuck himself that he got the idea to frame her for the murder, but it was just to teach her a lesson. He was never really going to let her take the fall for it.